“Open source is certainly at the foundation in terms of building out cloud technologies,” says Byran Che, senior director of product management at Red Hat and responsible for its cloud operations offerings, management software and Red Hat Enterprise MRG, (Red Hat’s Messaging, Real-time and Grid platform). “If you take a look at market share in the server space, as you look at traditional data centers, about 70 percent are running on the Windows platform and about 30 percent are running Linux. As you take a look at what operating systems people are choosing to build applications on in the cloud, the ratio flips completely.”

The reasoning is simple, Che says: With a fresh start, you get to build a whole new architecture from the ground up, and open source gives you the best value.

“You can’t get to the Amazon scale or the Google scale and pay the license fees,” he says.

But not so fast with this revolution. It seems Mr. Stallman has a big problem with the cloud and software-as-a-service (SaaS), saying they are not really open or free:

“SaaS and proprietary software lead to similar harmful results, but the causal mechanisms are different,” Stallman wrote in an article published by the Boston Review in 2010. “With proprietary software, the cause is that you have and use a copy which is difficult or illegal to change. With SaaS, the cause is that you use a copy you don’t have.”

“Many free software supporters assume that the problem of SaaS will be solved by developing free software for servers,” he adds. “For the server operator’s sake, the programs on the server had better be free; if they are proprietary, their owners have power over the server. That’s unfair to the operator, and doesn’t help you at all. But if the programs on the server are free, that doesn’t protect you as the server’s user from the effects of SaaS. They give freedom to the operator, but not to you.”

There are true open source options to avoid lock-in, as Olavsrud writes, including — among others — Apache’s Deltacloud.

There’s no doubt open source will — and already is — playing a big part in the cloud. And as Olavsrud at CIO writes, open source is key to keeping the cloud innovative. Cisco may not be playing along as much as Google, but who has more to lose?